Gonen Yonaten / Twitter.com
This week Hanan Awad, a 60-year-old blind woman from Nazareth in Northern Israel, has regained her eyesight after 20 years after surgery at Israel’s Beilinson Hospital (also known as the Rabin Medical Centre).
The procedure which had never been carried out in Israel before, is only performed in the most severe cases of corneal disease. It involved creating an artificial cornea, the outmost lens of the eye, from a fragment of the patient’s shin bone. Dr Livni, the head of the hospital’s cornea unit, described the surgery as the “only option” for patients like Awad, where “it is not possible to perform a cornea transplant from donor tissue”.
Although this is a rare surgery, the diagnosis is not; according to estimates by the World Health Organisation, every year about two million new cases of corneal blindness are recorded. In fact, diseases of the cornea are the second leading cause of blindness, after cataracts, in developing countries.The director of Beilinson’s Ophthalmology department, Professor Irit Bahar explained that this surgery is the second “breakthrough in the field of artificial corneas” that Beilinson Hospital has made this year.
Earlier in 2021, surgeons performed Israel’s first successful transplant using an artificial cornea developed by Israeli medical tech company CorNeat Vision. These two surgeries are only “performed in a small number of medical centres around the world, due to the great complexity associated with them”.
Beilinson Hospital is the only ophthalmology centre in Israel to perform these types of surgeries that restore eyesight to otherwise incurable blind patients.
